"leftovers/where do teeth go?"

"You are not supposed to wonder where your teeth go, only celebrate their departure. This habit of thought is so ingrained that even when I no longer believed [in the tooth fairy], I still didn't wonder where my teeth were going. Researching this point, I recently asked the tooth fairy where she had put my teeth. She sighed and said she threw them in the trash.

This seems like a sad end for something that used to be such an important part of my body. While they are in our mouths we know our teeth with such extraordinary intimacy that even a slight change, such as a chip, can be a constant distraction until the tongue gets used to it. And yet we say goodbye to them without a thought as to where they will end up: whether they are kept indefinitely, hoarded for awhile and then discarded, or immediately disposed of, tooth-fairy teeth, like most other teeth, probably end up in landfills or incinerators. In this respect, they are indeed trash - useless, excess to requirement, and a little bit disgusting, fit only to molder away with the rest of the stuff we no longer wish to think about."


"When we think of our first lost tooth, we remember again what such an absence felt like, how it began, strange and unnerving at first, a dangerous taste of blood on the tongue, and then later the thrill and promise of the gifts that might replace it. If baby teeth show us anything, it is that these gaps of nature and of history, which we make even as we fill them, must be filled in this way with only empty artifice, and hope, and forgetfulness."

- Helen Denise Polson, Cabinet, Issue 36